Shops get angry over paper's Prince album giveaway

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The Entertainment Retailers Association is currently deleting all its Prince MP3s in a big sulk. Even Sign O’ the Times. The sulk is over the Mail on Sunday giving away an estimated three million copies of Prince’s new album ‘Planet Earth’ over the weekend.

The ERA is angry that the move was clearly designed to boost newspaper sales, and has resulted in people buying the paper just to get the CD – and depriving shops the chance to make a huge profit out of it instead.

“It is entirely possible that 10s perhaps 100s of thousands of copies of this Sunday’s MoS will be purchased solely so that readers can get their hands on ‘Planet Earth’ and that the newspapers themselves are cast unread” says the ERA, which is precisely what will have happened.

The ERA doesn’t seem to understand that publications giving away free things to boost their circulation is pretty much how the entire publishing industry works these days.

Sounds like someone at the ERA didn’t manage to get tickets to see Prince this summer.